Wednesday, 9 August 2017

Bus Stop

Robin Wrigley

pink gin and tonic

The
moment Sharon turned the corner from the tube station her heart all but stopped.
Standing at the bus stop no more than fifty yards away was her husband Robert
and he was not alone. Stepping back around the street corner she leaned against
the sandstone wall of the bank, close to fainting.

She closed her eyes, took several deep
breaths and tried to arrange her thoughts into some sensible order, willing
herself not to cry. With grim determination she managed this and opened her
eyes.

Her
first thought was one of complete incredulity; the man she had been married to
for twenty-five years and listened to, pontificating about how he would never
ever catch a London bus for some
snobbish, stupid reason, was round the corner about to do just that with an
attractive woman half his age.

By the time she had composed herself
sufficiently to confront the pair the bus stop was empty and the bus was
disappearing down the street. ‘The bastard. The lying, conniving creep,’ she
muttered under her breath. ‘Just you wait my darling; talk your way out of this
if you can.’

He was
home on time a little after seven, announcing his arrival from the hall that he
was going to change before dinner; just as he always did.

‘Something smells good,’ he said as he
entered the kitchen, kissed the back of her neck and headed for the wine
glasses.

‘Red or white darling?’

‘Please yourself – it’s not important,' she replied noticeably
curt.

‘Something wrong? You sound a bit out of
sorts. What have I done this time? ‘He turned to regard her while pouring two
glasses of red wine.

‘All in good time Robert, all in good
time,’ she replied testing the potatoes with a fork.

This last remark was very unsettling and
Robert almost spilt the wine he was pouring.

‘Go and sit at the table this will be
ready in a jiffy and then we can have a nice little chat, you and me. A nice
little chat.’ She steeled herself to keep calm.

Robert carried the two glasses of wine
through to the dining room and sat down. Experience had taught him over the
years that there was no point in trying to carry on a conversation in the
kitchen when Sharon was like this. He would be lying if he wasn’t concerned, but
there was no point in pursuing this until she was good and ready.

She came into the room carrying the two
plates of dinner carefully placing Robert’s in front of him before sitting down
with her own. Once she was fully seated and after taking a sip of her wine, she
looked directly at her husband.

‘So how was your day Robert?’ She took
another sip of wine and sensed his obvious discomfort; at charged moments like
this the roles were normally reversed and invariably about credit card
expenditures.

He averted his gaze and began to eat
pausing after the first mouthful he said. ‘Not
much really, same old crap same as a normal Tuesday. Why d’you ask?’

‘Go anywhere at lunchtime?’

‘Only to the corner pub for a sandwich
with Will.’ His discomfort moved up several notches up and it showed.

‘So you didn’t go on one of those horrible
red buses that you’ve been telling everybody you’d never ride on
then?’

‘No,’ but his voice faltered and he again
avoided looking at her by concentrating on his meal.

‘You’re a damned liar Robert. I saw you
getting on a bus with some tart around midday and don’t you try and deny it.’
She had stood up and placed both hands on the end of the table glaring at him.

At the utterance of the last remark he
also jumped to his feet. 'Be careful what you say and who you label Sharon. You
are moving into deep waters. You might not like the answers to your extremely
offensive line of questioning.’ He took another, deeper drink from his glass and
moved to the kitchen for the bottle.

‘So who was this tart who has managed to
get you onto a bus, something for some utterly stupid reason you said you would
never, ever do. So many times I could have screamed then and I still could.’ She
held her glass out for a refill and with a slightly shaking hand he
obliged.

‘That tart is my daughter.’

Sharon fell back in her chair spilling
half of the wine on to the tablecloth creating a series of red splodges all
around the tablecloth in front of her plate.

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard right, she is my daughter; it
was her thirtieth birthday so I took her for lunch.’

It was as though Sharon had been hit
between the eyes with a hammer. They had spent a fortune on
getting the pair of them checked out in order to start a family. She proved to
be eminently fertile but his results always turned up negative.

‘But you’re sterile; you cannot produce
children. All the reports said that.’ Sharon’s control now failed and she
started to cry. How could this be?

‘She was conceived when I was a sixth
former at grammar school; her mother was a taxi driver I met in a coffee bar.
She simply fancied me and one thing led to another.’ He explained it as though
he had simply helped an old lady to cross the street. The man who had denied
her motherhood.

‘So how come we couldn’t have children?
The clinic all said that I was perfectly capable. Yet your tests came back
negative didn’t they? She looked at him closely; this was unbelievable.

‘I had a vasectomy after I graduated. I never
wanted kids. Don’t like them.’ He sat back down in an attempt to carry on
eating.